Best Practices and up to the minute news on Customer Experience Management and Service Excellence
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Best Practices and up to the minute news on Customer Experience Management and Service Excellence
Your hotel probably already meets the “basics” that guests have always expected such as a clean room, value for the price, a well-maintained, quiet property and a desirable location. But today’s hotel guests come with a set of higher expectations, according to “Next-Gen Hotel Guests Have Checked In,” a report from research and data firm Deloitte .”
“Guest expectations are continuing to rise,” according to the Deloitte report. “Many guests have come to expect excellence in the hospitality sector, and experiences in retail and other consumer-facing industries are now increasingly enhanced by predictive insights.
“This is leading hotel guests to expect that the information they have shared will be put to good use consistently. Today’s guests expect hotels to deliver on more than what is promised, and what is implied is that guests are now expecting hotels to go beyond.”
To conduct its research, Deloitte surveyed 6,600 hotel guests across 25 brands and various hotel tiers about what makes a great hotel experience.
To gain and retain guest loyalty, hotels must consider how guests and technology — along with insights about guest preferences — come together to deliver hospitality, according to the Deloitte report:
“Guests want the one-click, right-this-instant utility they receive from other industries like on-demand transportation and instant peer-to-peer payments, with the feeling they get from an evening at a fine dining restaurant.”
Survey respondents confirmed some well-known industry “truths” about the basics like the ones mentioned above. But the survey also found an evolution in guest expectations in some areas that can be differentiators to the hospitality guest experience.
Below is a rundown of insights on guest expectations that go beyond the basics from the Deloitte report.
| Hotel industry truths | Guest experience differentiators | How to improve the guest experience |
| Guests still care about the basics like a clean quiet room, well-maintained, safe and secure property, value and location. | The reason or “occasion” for travel | Boost guest satisfaction by knowing why guests travel and adjusting the experience accordingly |
| Guests want a hotel that “knows” enough about them to personalize their stay. | Loyalty programs that gather information to personalize the guest experience | Review and improve how your hotel recognizes loyalty, along with how rewards are earned, redeemed, and made more personal |
| Guests want to be “heard,” with an emphasis on resolving issues | Hotel staff that cares about issues with the room, hotel or amenities and listens with empathy to guest concerns | Listen to guest needs, empathize with their situations and then follow through |
| Guests seek both personal and technological interactions | A hotel that strikes a balance of personal and technological options | Offer a variety of options for guest and staff communication such as in-person, chatbots and messaging via the hotel app of another platform |
“The hotel industry can boast of a strong overall performance when it comes to GX, but there’s always room for improvement — and with roughly one in three guests saying they want even more from their stays, there’s a market for improvement as well,” states the Deloitte report.
“The place where hotels can do better is already aligned with a traditional strength: Knowing their guests and caring deeply about delivering a high-quality experience. The opportunity to improve is not science fiction. When hotels know their guests, stay frequency is increased by 13 percent. So, the next frontier is to put that information to use in ways that seamlessly drive subtle or even not-so-subtle changes in the guest experience.”
this won’t let me link to the full report because Deloitte downloaded it to my Google downloads. So I added a link to the page to download the report
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